Sarah J spoke with Cathy & Andy Cowell

Cathy: No. Absolutely not!

Andy: We also with healing went to hospitals and did healing. Again we were praying and they were quite unresponsive. We were praying for this woman who had really bad abdominal pains. We were praying for her; so again we get someone who speaks Makua, goes around and says to her, oh yes my stomach pain has gone, I'm praising Jesus.

Cathy: That was really difficult because you wouldn't have known. It was just that Andy sensed that something had happened so we asked the interpreter to come and ask her what had gone on; otherwise we would have gone away thinking that we'd prayed and nothing had transpired. So it was a really interesting experience; fantastically faith building.

Sarah J: Anyone can go out with Iris Ministries can't they? It's not something that you need to have special qualifications to go and do anything like that. People can go out as volunteers and help with the work can't they?

Cathy: Yes. Of course the Iris Ministries would like you to donate something, obviously to pay for bed and board, but they don't require that. That means that so long as you can raise your air fare, that's you done really. I guess they've just got a really big ministry of hospitality; so they'll welcome anybody to come and spend time there if they want to. All Iris required was that we could provide them with a reference and that was just our church leader at the time who did that for us and we provided that to them over the internet. They haven't got boundless space, so you do need to book. We were able to do that fairly quickly. We just googled Iris Ministries and Heidi Baker and found their website and then all the information was there. They've got bases all over Africa. So there are lots of different places people can go if they wanted to. I would certainly say, if you've got the time, that it was a fantastic faith building experience, apart from anything else. I think we gained more than we gave, if I was honest. It was great. So I would say if you can and you want to, then do go.

Sarah J: But what if someone's saying, well I haven't even got the money for the flight and stuff like that. I know that you guys have a nice story about that.

Cathy: You know there's that thing about, do you work to live, or do you live to work. Andy had been praying about that and really felt that God was saying, well no you live to give. That really made us both think about the way that we approach life and how do we see what we do. It's a bit of a wake-up call and we spent some time thinking about, well what does that actually mean and actually one of the things we realised about our life was that, most of the money that we earned, we earned just to keep ourselves going. We spend it on curries and in the pub; entertaining friends and paying the mortgage; paying the gas bill. We really thought, if we're saying that we want to live to give, what does that mean for our lifestyle? We made the decision that we would take time out and I'd just started a business and it involved Andy taking three months out of work and they gave him unpaid leave.

Andy: The old company had a sabbatical policy - the new company didn't have a sabbatical policy. Eventually I thought if I don't get a sabbatical will I have to give up the job to go? Eventually they said yes it would be wonderful for you to go and they were really up for me going and they let me go out for three months.

Cathy: I'm still a little bit hazy as to how we found the money, because about six months before we decided to go, for various reasons I'd given up a fairly well paid job in the NHS as a manager, to work for myself. We'd already taken a huge drop in salary and obviously to go we needed money for flights, we needed money for accommodation for whilst we were there. We also needed money to look after the house whilst we were gone. I guess quite a bit of money just kind of turned up. Somebody offered paying from a trust fund he had access to. We got tax rebates back that we weren't expecting.

Andy: I got a thousand pound tax rebate and thought where's that come from? Then a couple of weeks later...

Cathy: I got a tax rebate for a thousand pounds.

Andy: So God gave us two grand to start off with, just to give us a bit of initiative and a bit of a push.

Sarah J: That must have been really encouraging in terms of confirming that this is a good thing to be doing.

Cathy: Yes, absolutely. The other really interesting thing that happened was that we had some lodgers staying in the house and that was part of our plan for raising the money. Then just before we went, I was looking again at our finances and realised that we'd actually got extra; exactly the amount of money that we were expecting to get in from the lodgers. I kind of thought at the time, I wonder if God knows something that we don't. Then in the first three weeks that we were there, the lodgers did a runner. Obviously God had already budgeted for that, which was just amazing. I still don't really know how we managed to find the money that we did to go away. We did do things like - Andy found some bits and things that he sold. All those adverts about going, selling your gold; so we did some of that kind of stuff.

Andy: And we just basically cut down on certain things. It just seemed to come.

Cathy: I think it was really faith building for us. For me, I think there was something about that journey, from having a good stable NHS wage; to go from that to being self-employed and to actually taking three months out and discovering that God's provision didn't stop when I left the NHS; it's fabulous really.

Sarah J: Thank you so much for coming in and sharing your story.